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Runner and advocate Faith E. Briggs used to run through the streets of Brooklyn every morning. Now, she's running 150 miles through three U.S. National Monuments that lay in the thick of the controversy around public lands. Accompanied by running companions who represent diverse perspectives in what it means to be a public land owner, she assesses what is at stake if previously protected lands are reduced and if the public is largely unaware. THIS LAND is a story about land access told through a journey of inclusion and empowerment.

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This film has been Carbon Offset, learn more about the project and the process on our blog.

We've put THIS LAND online free of charge so that more people can see the film and use it as a tool for conversation. We want this film to be widely available for all viewers. For viewers that are able, especially when screening for an organization or festival, we ask for a suggested donation to screen the film. This allows us to continue to create materials like screening guides and curriculum, and help pay modest honorariums to speakers.

Additional screenings will be announced throughout the year, as many film festivals are being postponed or moving online, sign up for our mailing list to stay up to date on screenings near you!

The film premiered to a sold-out audience at Banff
Friday, November 1st, 2019 | Banff, Alberta

Saturday, January 18th @ 8pm & Sunday, January 19th @ 12:30pm

Sunday, February 9th | Ashland, Oregon

Friday, February 21st

March 5th - 8th | Denver, CO

March 11th | Sierra Madre, CA
March 12th | Santa Monica, CA
March 13th | Downtown Los Angeles, CA
March 22nd | Fredericksburg, VA

(now online via link above) | Washington D.C.

May 15th- 25th | online

August 27th- 30th | Bozeman MT

September 25-29, 2020 | Palm Springs, CA

October 2020 (dates tbd) | Dallas, TX

October 14th-18th, 2020 | Carbondale CO

Are you interested in hosting a screening at your school, job or organization? Filmmakers are available for talkbacks and panel discussions online and in person. Please reach out, we'd love to hear from you and work together to push the conversation forward. For larger companies, the film can be licensed for single or multiple showings.

Benj Drummond

Benj is a photographer, producer and designer. Originally trained as a geologist, he came to photography inspired by its power to motivate environmental and social change. Benj's work has appeared in National Geographic, Mother Jones, Orion, Smithsonian and Photo District News and been exhibited at more than a dozen events and venues including the Houston Center for Photography and the Ansel Adams / Mumm Napa Fine Art Gallery. Together with his wife, Sara Joy Steele, he produces multimedia stories for a variety of nonprofits, academic institutions, publications and others to create change through filmmaking, photography and interactive design. Benj particularly loves to make science personal and to build teams to amplify the impact of purpose-driven work. Their films have toured internationally and been featured by Telluride Mountainfilm, Wild & Scenic Film Festival and Yale Environment 360. Benj and Sara have presented at a variety of events and venues, from prisons and universities to Collaborations for Cause, which Benj helped co-produce. Finally, Benj and Sara serve on the advisory board of Blue Earth and Benj is a fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers.

- Email Benj / Instagram @ benjdrummond / Website benjandsara.com

"This is our land, even if our voices are historically missing from the conversation."

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This Land is a running story, following Faith E. Briggs on foot for 150 miles as she explores her role as a conservationist who comes from a community historically underrepresented in the conservation movement. Visiting National Monuments under threat of reduction by the Trump administration and joi

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Code Switch Podcast, Episode 2: Being 'Outdoorsy' When You're Black Or Brown

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast

subscribe to Code Switch podcast

As the weather teeters between 1997 DJ Jazzy Jeff and 2002 Nelly, we've been spending a lot of time staring out the window, wishing to be anywhere but inside: the beach, the pool, the basketball court, Grand Teton National Park.

Well, maybe not that last one. Truth is, people of color aren't heading to national parks in droves. In fact, according to the National Park Service, last year about 80 percent of all national parks visitors, volunteers and staff were white.

And as this Funny or Die video gets at, REI-inspired activities like mountain biking, skiing and whitewater rafting don't really pull in the POCs, either.

But hold on a sec. People of color hang out outside all the time. Aren't we the champions of cookouts, supreme at summer block parties? Critics of anti-loitering laws say they're aimed at keeping us from hanging outside too much, and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans make up the vast majority of people who work the land for food.

Oh, right. Those last two are where it starts getting complicated. There are real reasons, both historical and contemporary, that can make stepping outside in your free time while black or brown a politically charged move.

At the same time, there are some really interesting organizations and individuals pushing the boundaries of what "being outdoorsy" looks like, and we wanted to know what they're up to.

So join us for the Code Switch Podcast, Episode 2: Made For You And Me, as we explore what it means to be a person of color outdoors. Listen as you hike, garden, or stare blankly at the walls of your windowless cubicle, waiting for the weekend.

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Code Switch Podcast, Episode 2: Being 'Outdoorsy' When You're Black Or Brown

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast As the weather teeters between 1997 DJ Jazzy Jeff and 2002 Nelly, we've been spending a lot of time staring out the window, wishing to be anywhere but inside: the beach, the pool, the basketball court, Grand Teton National Park.

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Black Outdoors: The Connections Between Race and Outdoor Space

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Black Outdoors: The Connections Between Race and Outdoor Space

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A conversation on race and the outdoors from a Canadian perspective

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Black Outdoors: The Connections Between Race and Outdoor Space - Crowdcast

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Register now for TPL Innovation's event on Crowdcast, scheduled to go live on Friday June 19, 2020 at 2:00 pm EDT.

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Ken Burns: The National Parks - America's Best Idea

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Ken Burns: The National Parks - America's Best Idea

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Long and comprehensive history of the national park system

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This 12-hour, six-part documentary series by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan tells the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should...

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This 12-hour, six-part documentary series by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan tells the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should...

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Amazing article by Latria Graham '08 that weaves together the history of representation in the outdoors with her personal experiences.

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When I type "black people don't" into Google, statements like "black people don't like to work" and "black people don't travel" show up. When I add "camp," I get a Guardian article called "Why Don't Black People Camp?" BlackAmericaWeb.com, a news site for African Americans, features a list of "22 Things Black Folks Don't Do." Number two is "Go camping or hiking." Seven is "Go to national parks." Later comes "Swim" (#17), landing just ahead of "Eat tofu" (#19).

There's reality behind some of these beliefs, but the big takeaway-that black people dislike the outdoors-is wrong. I've loved the woods and wild places all my life, and the same is true for my family and friends. According to a 2016 poll by New America Media's Next 100 Coalition-a group of civil rights, conservation, and community organizations working to bring diversity to national parks and other outdoor spaces-we're not alone. Seventy percent of those surveyed, all people of color, said they regularly participate in outdoor activities, including hiking, camping, photography, and picnicking. In that same poll, 57 percent of respondents said they'd visited U.S. public lands.

So why do these stereotypes persist, despite statistics and visible evidence that prove otherwise?

In part it's because African Americans don't always go where white people do. Swimming? Pools used to be segregated in the South and other parts of the country, so it wasn't easy to join a team and practice your freestyle kick. Skiing? Not in the cards if you're poor and live in an inner city. Beaches? In many places, blacks were banned by law or custom. And national parks weren't especially welcoming, either; many were created as an escape from urban sprawl, at a time when urban was shorthand for blacks and immigrants. The parks were designed to be clean and white, and if we let the data tell the story, that's how they've stayed. In 2009, the National Park Service did a comprehensive survey of the American public, consisting of phone interviews with more than 4,000 participants. According to their data, African Americans comprised just 7 percent of visitors.

But again, the reasons for this are really more about history than desire. In that same survey, 16 percent of African Americans said they hadn't visited a national park because they thought the parks were unsafe. (Less than 5 percent of non-Hispanic whites responded this way.) Why is this number so high? I believe it's partly because of the Park Service's history of discrimination. Shenandoah National Park was guilty of this shameful practice as late as the 1940s, hanging wooden signs at certain spots that identified Picnic Grounds for Negroes. Signs on some bathrooms said they were for white women only.

Many national parks were created an as escape from urban sprawl, at a time when urban was shorthand for blacks and immigrants. They were designed to be clean and white, and if we let the data tell the story, that's how they've stayed.

These days I tend to visit a Park Service site approximately once every two years, but that's because there aren't many national parks close to where I live: Spartanburg, South Carolina. I'm now 31. I didn't visit my first, Everglades National Park, until I was 26. But I've been a disciple of landscapes for as long as I can remember.

My family has always had a cultural connection to the outdoors-our relationship with the land is the cornerstone of a shared history. When we tell stories, we remember the years by what the weather was like. (I graduated from Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, in 2008, at the beginning of the Great Recession. That year, I remember, it hailed six times in Spartanburg County.) For us land ownership is a point of pride. What we have isn't much, but it's ours, and to us that feels like freedom. Our 15 acres of farmland, houses, and trees-along with a nearby lake where we have access-has given my family somewhere to hunt, fish, explore, and play outdoors. It's where my dad found a renewed sense of purpose as a small farmer.

If you cut me, my blood would be the color of the red-clay hills my family has walked and worked for four generations. We were shaped by the soil, which is red from its iron content but also, in my mind, from the violence of southern history. The land fortifies us, makes us strong, and the deep scarlet dust clings to our bodies like mist on the nearby mountains.

My father, in his youth, thought farming would be his undoing, so he left, part of the mass exodus of rural black men and women who went off in search of something better-college, a corporate job, new places for new dreams. He eventually came back, which allowed me a reconnection that has been one of my life's greatest blessings.

In my early years we lived on the edge of Nashville, Tennessee, our days spent in nature. We played in a creek that ran along our property, examining tadpoles and catching bugs we found in the backyard, stowing them in mason jars, and poking holes in the lid so our specimens could breathe. We swung from the gnarled limbs of a peach tree, forcing petals to fall prematurely, violent streaks of pink strewn across a freshly mowed lawn.

I was a Girl Scout, my younger brother a Boy Scout. We often tagged along on each other's camping trips, accompanied by our father, a veteran woodsman. My brother and I wanted to be artists. My father's goal was to make sure that, whatever we decided to do, we'd be self-sufficient, always capable of feeding ourselves.

When I was ten, in the summer of 1997, my father was lured back to South Carolina: the iron in his veins was calling. We landed in the suburbs of Spartanburg, but most of my free time was spent at the bottom of Newberry County, in Silverstreet, population 162.

Corn and soybeans had taken over the landscape by then, tended in neat little rows near the highway, cloaking the countryside with green. Two streets over from the main road, the idyllic rural setting is replaced by something more rustic. Over here, the street signs are covered in kudzu. Cars that no longer run list to the side, jacked up, tires in the air. Deserted barns, slowly being absorbed back into the forest, occasionally burp the damp, earthy, rotting smell of soil. The rust on metal roofs blossoms and spreads during summer like the honeysuckle clinging to my grandmother's mailbox. We're impossible to find if you don't know where to look. We don't mind.

This is my inheritance, and I adore it. As children we spent our time crisscrossing a network of back roads that even the police didn't come down unless you called them or there was a warrant out. This is home-the Graham family compound, where most of my aunts and uncles own property adjacent to the two-story, yellow and white house where my grandmother still lives.

This is where I did all my sustenance and survival training under the watchful eye of my father. I learned about herbal medicines from my grandmother, committing to memory knowledge that never made its way to the page. I tended hogs with my uncle and cousins. I learned what it meant to provide for myself through hard agricultural work, my body sunburned and tense from building barbed-wire fences to keep the cows away from my ripening cantaloupes. I spent muggy, itchy summer days in long-sleeved clothing, picking okra.

My eagle-eyed father could spot a pecan tree amid a thick grove of other species while lighting a cigarette and steering his gold-colored truck with his knees. He had hands the size of baseball gloves and a way with a knife that I never quite mastered. He loved the land even when it didn't love him back.

My father had a special affinity for fishing, and for him, being outdoors meant you had to accomplish something-the outing had to involve finding food or checking off a chore, like routine fence maintenance. A walk through the woods would yield a shirttail full of muscadines or a baseball cap stuffed with blackberries, the brim forever stained with juice. Generosity, love, and care all revealed themselves in his woods.

I would not experience real backcountry wilderness-the kinds of places Outside celebrates-until I went off to Dartmouth in 2004. That's also when I started learning about the various things that black people don't do.

I'd never run up against these assertions before. In the mostly white suburb where I went to school, being black meant being different, yes, but the real split was between rural kids and the affluent kids from the other side of town. This rivalry played out every year at a high school football game between Dorman (rural) and Spartanburg (city). We would come to school dressed in overalls and clanging cowbells, with the occasional upperclassman driving a tractor in from the farm. In this setting, being black meant being hardworking and capable, not subservient. My parents encouraged anything I wanted to try. I knew how to sew and shoot before I knew how to drive.

At the start of college, I began to feel ambivalent about where I came from. In the larger American culture of that period-the early days of Facebook- southern was code for stupid and black meant second-class. This was the first time I heard that black people don't do the outdoors. Later, when I had to complete a 50-yard swimming requirement for graduation, I was told that we don't swim either, the way women were told we weren't interested in STEM classes.

I took a wilderness-rescue course one winter, in breath-snatching cold that left my eyelashes frozen. The snow was up to our armpits as we practiced different ways to carry an injured friend out of the woods. Over the years, I would traverse the Green Mountains and the White Mountains. I made my way to the top of Mount Washington with people from my geography class.

Often feeling marginalized a thousand miles from home, I searched for some way to understand my heritage amid the landscape of history. In high school, we'd read the traditional canon of old dead white men, and there was no room for my people in that picture. When African American literature entered my consciousness, it was all about urban spaces, created by writers who, as a result of the Great Migration out of the South, lived in cities like Chicago and New York. I needed to give voice to my experiences, too, and their urban revelations were at odds with what I knew.

Nobody cared about stories like mine, I thought, and by extension nobody cared about me. Professors could smell the desperation, the sour hint of terror-sweat on my skin. Still, my body could not endure the erasure of my ancestry, of the adventurer in me. There were weeks when I couldn't sleep at all and found myself outside, walking through uninhabited places, waiting for the sun to rise, unsure if it ever would. Hemmed in by tall gray walls of granite, I wondered if this even counted as living.

Zora Neale Hurston saved me. Years before I discovered the serene but spare poetry of Lucille Clifton and the devastating prose of Jesmyn Ward, Hurston, an anthropologist and Floridian who published mainly in the 1930s, was the first writer who made me feel that there was still a place for me outside. In books like Mules and Men, she made literature out of life in a way I'd never read before. She gave me a means to understand all the death and destruction I read about in history books, and the role that race and class played in it.

Hurston talked about wild places and true things, about men and women I recognized, and my skin prickled with their familiarity. I wanted to be a bold adventurer like her-setting off in her car, gun in the glove box, connecting with endangered people who those in power would rather stayed silent, knowing that if they talked they would tell terrible truths.

That's how, at age 26, I found myself in the Everglades, on a trip with my parents, at a time when my father was suffering through the late stages of terminal cancer. It was February 2013, and the first time we'd ever attempted a trip like this together. When I was a child, Great Smoky Mountains was the park closest to where I lived. We passed it plenty of times, but always on the way somewhere else. In Nashville, my parents held corporate jobs in retail management. If they were able to get two days off in a row, we often piled into our slate Mitsubishi and headed for the Graham family homestead. The trip took eight hours each way, no time for detours.

When we moved back to South Carolina, we ran a farm and produce stand that became a year-round obligation. A long road trip to someplace like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Olympic National Park was out of the question.

Geography is one of the largest impediments to overcome. National parks are not evenly spread across the U.S. Certain chapters in our country's history-including westward expansion, which involved the takeover of Indian land that often became national parks-explain the disparity.

According to the 2010 census, 55 percent of respondents who identified as black lived in the South, which has only nine national parks unevenly scattered throughout the entire region, including Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, Hot Springs in Arkansas, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and Shenandoah in Virginia. Then there are the Biscayne, Everglades, and Dry Tortugas parks, clustered together deep in South Florida. In the extreme southwest corner of Texas-which barely counts as the South-sit Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains.

The states of Delaware, Maryland, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia don't have any national parks at all. For most people living in those areas, visiting a national park means at least a day's drive. Park visitors also must find places to eat and sleep, at a time when most African American survey respondents list time and money as two of the most significant barriers to getting outside.

Spending a week in Everglades National Park, my parents and I explored Chokoloskee Bay and tramped through the swamps right outside Everglades City, talking to anyone who would talk to us. We were slightly disoriented by the feeling of exploring a place that we'd only read about in books, but we got in the swing soon enough. We spotted red-winged blackbirds and roseate spoonbills-and, of course, my father saw them first. We took a tram tour into Shark Valley. We stopped at every café along the Tamiami Trail, hoping that something would soothe my father's taste buds, burned dull from the chemotherapy pills he was taking. (Frog legs did the trick.) Herons, egrets, and cormorants kept us company as we tried to figure out where we should head next.

During that trip, we never camped on park property, instead staying in either a bed-and-breakfast or a KOA site. I wasn't sure how to go about getting a camping reservation in the park on short notice, and I needed to know that my father had easy access to medical care if he needed it.

My dad was more worried about our safety. Born in 1951, he grew up in the Jim Crow South, where segregation was law-sometimes enforced with fists, handcuffs, or a rope. For all the progress America had made by 2013, he couldn't shake the memories. During his youth, racist local laws, discriminatory social codes, segregated commercial facilities, and racial profiling by police made it impossible to relax in public spaces.

Back then people of color could be embarrassed, insulted, or killed for subjective infractions like being too successful, "uppity," or in the wrong town after dark. These fears were solidified by the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the summer of 1955. His alleged crime? Making a lewd advance at Carolyn Bryant, a white Mississippi storekeeper, who decades later admitted that she'd lied.

When someone threatens your life, you remember. When I was in college, I took my father to a South Carolina apple orchard where you paid for a set amount of apples that you picked yourself. Halfway through our excursion, the owner emerged from the trees holding a shotgun, accusing us of taking more than our fair share. She was willing to shoot us over a few apples we didn't even have.

If there's one thing about being black in America that scares me still, it's how quickly circumstances can deteriorate. One moment you're a customer, the next a robber. Every time I watch black people bleed on TV, bodies slumped on pavement, I realize how easily it could have been me. Almost every person of color does this. In Richard Wright's 1935 poem "Between the World and Me," the narrator, a black man, enters the woods and stumbles upon a scene where another black man has been tarred, feathered, and burned alive. In the middle of the poem, a metaphysical transformation occurs: Wright inhabits the body of the victim and feels the experience of being lynched himself. Something similar had happened to an uncle of his, decades earlier. Like Wright, black people know instinctively that bad things happen in the woods.

Even though the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited racial segregation in public facilities, tensions persist-if not at an institutional level, then certainly among individuals. In a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, 43 percent of blacks said they believed that America would never make the changes needed to give them equal rights with whites. Only 11 percent of whites expressed doubt that these changes would come. I don't want to be in that 43 percent. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of the outdoors, and recent data is encouraging.

According to KOA's 2017 North American Camping Report, 42 percent of African American campers say they feel more welcome in the outdoors compared with the past. Camping among Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians continues to increase, with nonwhites now totaling one-fourth of all campers-which is double what it was in 2012, the first year it was measured. We might not be in national parks, but we're at the lake, at private campgrounds close to home, and in state parks.

Disappointment comes with the desire to see results quickly. People who monitor the statistics can tell you the cost of everything-the programs and outreach initiatives-but don't necessarily understand the value. A child's first exploration of the natural world isn't quantifiable. It's hard to put a price on learning to read the sky or the ability to smell the wind and distinguish the scents it brings.

I believe it will take another generation of progress to change the perception people have about how people of color relate to the outdoors. If there are stalls in that progress, it might take two. Perhaps the best metric of change is word of mouth-or, in the age of the Internet, a strong social-media presence showing African American people enjoying all the places that, previously, segregation didn't allow us to go.

Born in 1951, my dad grew up in the Jim Crow South, where segregation was law-sometimes enforced with fists, handcuffs, or a rope. For all the progress that's been made in America, he couldn't shake the memories.

We are doing it. We are out there. We always have been. My Instagram feed is filled with people of color tackling V12 climbs, ascending mountains, teaching their children how to read the sky. Those images appear alongside Audubon Society and National Park Service photos of all the places I plan to go one day.

That evidence is part of why I keep stacking my money, planning for another good vacation in the national parks. At times it's the only weapon I have against despair. I'm able to do everything my ancestors couldn't-that's the structure of my resistance. I swim in public pools and lounge on public beaches because they couldn't dare.

I am constantly working to figure out how to make you acknowledge me as American, too. I refuse to be seen as poor and powerless, and I attempt to approach each day with a boldness and vulnerability that leaves an imprint on somebody. I continue to penetrate spaces where I'm not expected to be, hoping someone else will see me and know that they can be there, too.

For historically disenfranchised people, some healing has to happen first, and it occurs when our lives are treated with dignity, respect, and care. That is what causes us to challenge vigilante violence and hateful rhetoric. We are still working our way toward reconciliation. I believe it will have to take the shape of restorative justice.

People of color are still often left out of the conservation decisions and planning that affect their communities. Creating equitable outdoor experiences means dedicating money, energy, and resources to programs that have been denied us for decades. For this to happen, well-meaning white people must abandon the post-racial, colorblind fantasy they would like to believe in. The hardest part of my fight is combating the white majority's fear-stained imagination about what they believe black people are, as opposed to the reality of who we are.

Spare me your empathy if it does not come coupled with institutional change. Support the initiatives and institutions that help people of color get out there, like the nonprofit Outdoor Afro and the National Park Foundation's African American Experience Fund. Help reframe the discussion about the outdoors. Highlight the stories of the buffalo soldiers, who became some of America's first park rangers. Tell the children about Harriet Tubman's ability to interpret the weather. Be unafraid of the historical contexts that hold weight in our country. Explore and overturn those caricatures that are deeply embedded in the mythology we perpetuate about the unjust portions of our history. Having an integrated outdoors means embracing all of America-complete with its messy origins, complicated backstory, and currently murky future. It might mean allowing someone else to claim what you believed to be your exclusive birthright.

When you hear about what black people don't do, know that the statistics are only part of the story and can be counterproductive to the future of African Americans in the outdoors. It's time we change the story we're telling. Realize that we, as a diaspora, are just as multifaceted, complex, and diverse as the national parks we are starting to explore.

Latria Graham (@LatriaGraham) has written for the Guardian, ESPNW, and the New York Times.

Lead Photo: Courtesy Latria Graham

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There's a common misconception that black people don't love wild places. Latria Graham, a southerner with deep connections to farms, rivers, and forests, says the problem isn't desire but access-and a long history of laws and customs that have whitewashed our finest public lands.

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Is Diversity Just a Marketing Strategy for Gear Brands?

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Is Diversity Just a Marketing Strategy for Gear Brands?

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Cool article on the industry side of the outdoors

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When a human-resources team from Patagonia flew to Atlanta last fall for an internship-recruitment session at historically black Morehouse College, many of the 50 students who attended had basically the same reaction: What's Patagonia?

It was the company's first event at Morehouse, and "for a lot of the students, Patagonia was a newer brand," says recruitment manager Deanna Lloyd.

Longtime browsers of the Patagonia catalog probably won't be surprised to learn that the company's workforce is exceedingly homogeneous. "The majority of our employees are white," Lloyd concedes. It's a similar story throughout the gear industry. But Patagonia, REI, the North Face, and a handful of others are attempting to change that by rethinking their business models and hiring practices. Given the degree to which people of color and members of the LGBTQ community are underrepresented in outdoor-industry jobs, it's a formidable task. And while assessing progress is difficult at this stage, experts say there's a long way to go.

Statistics regarding diversity at gear companies are hard to come by. But according to a 2014 report by the advocacy group Green 2.0 on the racial makeup of environmental organizations, people of color comprise a distressingly low 12 to 15 percent. (The data is based on a survey of more than 300 nonprofits, government agencies, and grant foundations.) Those numbers "would most likely be mirrored in the outdoor industry, if not worse, in my own personal experience," says Ava Holliday, founding partner of the Avarna Group, a consulting firm that advises outdoor companies and environmental groups in their diversity and inclusion efforts.

Holliday cites a "clear business case" for diversity and inclusion: the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that by 2044, people of color will be the majority. Without a diverse workforce, she adds, product quality will suffer. "How will a gear company figure out how to make outdoor clothing for trans people without trans voices in the company?" she asks. Not to mention that if the industry wants to help preserve public lands, it will need to do its part to create a more inclusive playground and rally that majority to safeguard the environment.

Patagonia is acutely aware of the country's changing demographics. "It's the reality," Lloyd says. "We need to pay attention to it in all aspects of our work and make sure that Patagonia remains relevant in those conversations, from a mission standpoint and from a product standpoint."

Diversity hiring is a crucial step in dismantling the exclusivity endemic to the industry. "It's really important that people open their eyes to what's out there and how the world is changing, to create more opportunities for people to come to the table," says Eboni Preston, director of programs for the Greening Youth Foundation (GYF), which works to introduce underrepresented communities to environmental advocacy.

Those that aren't fully invested in inclusivity hiring risk engaging in a version of so-called greenwashing-creating the appearance of diversity through marketing campaigns without making a real effort behind the scenes.

Many gear companies have committed to hiring more women, and some are making strides toward diversity in their advertising and marketing. REI's numerous diversity initiatives include the popular 2017 Force of Nature campaign, which featured stories of female adventurers, many of them women of color. And recent North Face ads have highlighted athletes from diverse backgrounds, including women of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and black and adaptive climbers.

But for some companies, diversity ends there. There's a difference between making ad campaigns more inclusive and hiring a diverse group of employees in design, product-management, and executive roles. Those that aren't fully invested in inclusivity hiring risk engaging in a version of so-called greenwashing-creating the appearance of diversity through marketing campaigns without making a real effort behind the scenes. That's happening at some major brands, says Kenji Haroutunian, a business consultant who advises clients on diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, or DEI-human-relations-speak for hiring people of color, LGBTQ people, and women. Haroutunian is also a former director of Outdoor Retailer, the gear industry's biggest trade show. "From a marketing standpoint, they're reaching out and showing a different face," he says. "Internally, though, they're still being run by the usual suspects."

Holliday concurs. "There are quite a few brand ambassadors and social-media influencers being featured," she says, adding that the North Face recently highlighted black mountaineer Tyrhee Moore. "But when we go and work with companies, I don't see that much racial diversity in the staff."

Changing an entrenched culture isn't easy. One reason is that employers typically don't look beyond a small, insular pool of prospective hires-the vast majority of whom are white. "At a lot of these companies, people were hired because they were buddies," says Deanne Buck, executive director of Camber Outdoors, a nonprofit formerly dedicated to gender equality that recently shifted its focus to underrepresented groups in general. "You got in because you knew someone or raced with them." The result is an industry that's "hyper-networked," in Lloyd's parlance.

Compounding the problem is that smaller brands often lack HR staff, or even a single recruiter, not to mention formalized DEI practices. And many larger businesses have been slow to make equitable hiring a priority. "If they've been doing it the same way for a long time and they're successful, they don't necessarily see a reason to change," says Haroutunian.

Still, many companies are making progress. Canadian gear retailer MEC began a DEI program in 2009 that filtered into its marketing materials in 2012. "When we changed the brand, we had a lot of negative sentiment in social media," MEC's chief executive David Labistour said in a 2014 interview. But the company continued to thrive; revenues spiked 10 percent in 2012 and have continued to steadily grow. In 2015, sales were $282 million, a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

Last summer, MEC deepened its commitment to diversity, according to new HR director Nahal Yousefian. The focus is on helping staffers recognize unconscious bias, which Yousefian hopes will spur change driven by employees themselves. "Instead of a centralized HR department coming up with a policy renewal every year, people are actively out there, engaged and ensuring the barriers are removed," she says.

Patagonia partnered with the Greening Youth Foundation, which is helping bring people of color into the apparel brand's competitive summer internship program; the Atlanta recruitment trip last fall was sparked by a former GYF intern who attended Morehouse. This year, 9,000 applicants vied for 18 internships. Patagonia selected two black interns through GYF in 2017, and this year it chose one. (Lloyd notes that there were additional interns of color that the company recruited by its own efforts.) Patagonia hasn't hired any former GYF interns to permanent positions, but it did hire one as a seasonal worker this summer. Lloyd says that a scarcity of entry-level positions-or positions of any kind-means that "we don't guarantee employment for our interns."

Still, Lloyd considers Patagonia's recruitment efforts successful, pointing out that three times as many people of color applied to the internship program this year as in 2017. "We have been able to reach a more diverse candidate pool," she says.

REI has long been an industry leader in diversity hiring, according to Haroutunian. REI's website proclaims it "a workplace where everyone is welcome and everyone is comfortable being who they are," and it broadcasts REI's support of marriage equality. The site also offers a glimpse at the company's racial diversity: currently, 18 percent of its workforce and 30 percent of its board of directors are people of color, and in 2017, it increased the ranks of executives of color from zero to 6 percent.

For the past decade or so, REI has been "standing on the gas pedal, making changes to various elements of their business, including marketing and outreach, recruitment, and their real estate strategy," says Haroutunian. That included putting stores in urban centers like Las Vegas, Houston, and Washington, D.C.

To reach a range of communities, the company partnered with Black Girls Run,the National Brotherhood of Skiers and Cyclists, and the urban cycling festival Ciclavia. It also teamed up with Outdoor Afro-a group that has partnerships with about a dozen other gear businesses, including Columbia, Keen, Klean Kanteen, Osprey, and Patagonia. Similarly, Polartec's sponsorships include the adaptive outdoor recreation group Paradox Sports and Open Style Lab, a nonprofit that makes apparel for people with disabilities, and the North Face linked up with Latino Outdoors and the Paradox Sports Adaptive Climbing Initiative.

Among the other companies with dedicated diversity programs is Massachusetts-based Polartec, which pays its interns-most of whom are Hispanic students at a nearby private Catholic high school-by covering their tuition. It also posts job listings on 40 websites in an effort to go "beyond LinkedIn, Facebook, and some of the locations where [the applicants are] a little more homogeneous," says Breanne Buzay, Polartec's vice president of human resources. This year, Keen began a partnership with the Greening Youth Foundation for its summer internship program. The North Face's Explore Fund gives grants to groups that are underrepresented in the outdoors; through its parent company, VF Corporation, it posts job openings on more than 800 employment sites, and it recently sent recruiters to the diversity summit People of the Global Majority.

Assembling a diverse staff comes naturally to a few companies, including the Philadelphia gear and apparel brand United by Blue and retailer Gear Coop in Costa Mesa, California. Both pull from racially diverse pools of people living in the surrounding communities.

With 45 employees, Gear Coop is a small, minority-owned business without an HR department or formal hiring protocols of any kind. But its owner, Terry Lee, says the company has informally made "deliberate diversity decisions." Every department of the company has women and minorities on staff-mostly Asian and Latino-he says, adding that Gear Coop's LGBTQ workers have historically comprised between 5 and 15 percent of its overall workforce.

"Every time I go to Outdoor Retailer, I'm reminded of how nondiverse the outdoor industry is," says Brian Linton, founder and CEO of United by Blue. Back home it's a different story. "Not that we're perfect or a full representation of what diversity means to the outdoor industry, but we're based in Philadelphia, and we're naturally in a position to be more diverse."

Linton says 10 percent of United by Blue staff are people of color or LGBTQ. He believes his company's focus on the urban outdoors helps attract a diverse workforce. "We appeal to people that are all walks of life," he says. "It's not just about going out and climbing El Capitan or trying to do extreme adventures. It's a very approachable brand, and therefore it's an approachable company for a diverse group of people."

The outdoor industry lags behind the hotel, health care, and telecommunications fields, and even some tech companies, according to Fortune's rankings of the most diverse workplaces.

That philosophy is echoed at REI. "They've had a long-term strategy of broadening their appeal," Haroutunian says of the retail co-op. "And they walked away from their hardcore customer long ago."To help lure people of all abilities, REI carries a wide range of products-including newbie-friendly used gear and a less expensive house-branded line. The company has seen steady growth in recent years; in 2017, sales were $2.6 billion, a 2.5 percent increase over the previous year.

That REI's diversity numbers are impressive compared with other gear companies underscores how far the outdoor industry still needs to go. The industry lags behind the hotel, health care, and telecommunications fields, and even some tech companies, according to Fortune's rankings of the most diverse workplaces. People of color make up 81 percent of Foot Locker's workforce (compared with REI's 18 percent) and 33 percent of the executive echelon at Dropbox (versus REI's 6 percent).

Marketing campaigns, outreach and partnership programs, and DEI efforts help. What else can companies do? They can recruit widely-way beyond their buddy networks. They can use more inclusive language in job postings and reevaluate the skills they require. "What qualifications are necessary and what are things folks can learn on the job?" as Holliday puts it. That extends to college degrees and experience in the outdoor industry. Removing some requirements can open up the talent pool.

Creating a welcoming company culture is also important. "Whether it's a person of color or a transgender person, they should feel like it's an equitable workplace, with equal opportunities for a fulfilling career," says Camber Outdoors' Deanne Buck. "You definitely don't want people coming in and leaving because they don't feel like there's a good opportunity for them."

One way to retain a diverse workforce is through sponsorships-mentoring programs in which established employees introduce newcomers to higher-ups, putting them on the radar for future projects.

REI and MEC have been working on equity and inclusion hiring for about a decade, but it's early days for most of the industry. Some companies are taking small steps and hatching plans for future initiatives. Others talk a big game but have shown limited results. Many say they consider DEI a priority, even if they won't divulge specific policies or plans.

Camber Outdoors' recent shift to the full range of underrepresented groups was prompted in part by the realization that its efforts were benefiting only a subset of women. "Using the word women in our mission didn't account for the complex and varied experiences of women," Buck says. "We were leaving women of color out of the conversations and the solutions." The group's new focus is on developing programs to help gear companies create "leadership teams that reflect our population and demographics," she says. To that end, Camber Outdoors is bringing together members of the industry to develop a set of DEI standards-for instance, that all final-candidate pools for director-level positions include two women and two people of color.

Patagonia is working with the Avarna Group to help develop its DEI initiatives. "This is a long-term process," Lloyd says. The company intends to expand its GYF internship program; this fall it plans to embark on a southeastern tour targeting more historically black universities.

GYF interns receive broad experience at Patagonia, working in the design, compliance, and marketing departments, among others, according to GYF program director Eboni Preston. In other words, they aren't being placed solely in high-visibility departments to maximize the optics. "Not to be funny, but no, the black kids aren't all going to marketing," says Preston. "They've spread the diversity across Patagonia as a whole."

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Lead Photo: Taj Mihelich

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In the Outdoor Industry, Is Diversity Just a Marketing Strategy?

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When a human-resources team from Patagonia flew to Atlanta last fall for an internship-recruitment session at historically black Morehouse College, many of the 50 students who attended had basically the same reaction: What's Patagonia? It was the company's first event at Morehouse, and "for a lot of the students, Patagonia was a newer brand," says recruitment manager Deanna Lloyd.

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Article about the experiences of a queer Black woman thru-hiking the AT

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It's the spring of 2016, and I'm ten miles south of Damascus, Virginia, where an annual celebration called Trail Days has just wrapped up. Last night, temperatures plummeted into the thirties. Today, long-distance Appalachian Trail hikers who'd slept in hammocks and mailed their underquilts home too soon were groaning into their morning coffee. A few small fires shot woodsmoke at the sun as thousands of tent stakes were dislodged. Over the next 24 hours, most of the hikers in attendance would pack up and hit the 554-mile stretch of the AT that runs north through Virginia.

I've used the Trail Days layover as an opportunity to stash most of my belongings with friends and complete a short section of the AT I'd missed, near the Tennessee-Virginia border. As I'm moving along, a day hiker heading in the opposite direction stops me for a chat. He's affable and inquisitive. He asks what many have asked before: "Where are you from?" I tell him Miami.

He laughs and says, "No, but really. Where are you from from?" He mentions something about my features, my thin nose, and then trails off. I tell him my family is from Eritrea, a country in the Horn of Africa, next to Ethiopia. He looks relieved.

"I knew it," he says. "You're not black."

I say that of course I am. "None more black," I weakly joke.

"Not really," he says. "You're African, not black-black. Blacks don't hike."

I'm tired of this man. His from-froms and black-blacks. He wishes me good luck and leaves. He means it, too; he isn't malicious. To him there's nothing abnormal about our conversation. He has categorized me, and the world makes sense again. Not black-black. I hike the remaining miles back to my tent and don't emerge for hours.

(Courtesy of Rahawa Haile)

Heading north from Springer Mountain in Georgia, the Appalachian Trail class of 2017 would have to walk 670 miles before reaching the first county that did not vote for Donald Trump. The average percentage of voters who did vote for Trump-a xenophobic candidate who was supported by David Duke-in those miles? Seventy-six. Approximately 30 miles farther away, they'd come to a hiker hostel that proudly flies a Confederate flag. Later they would reach the Lewis Mountain campground in Shenandoah National Park-created in Virginia in 1935, during the Jim Crow era-and read plaques acknowledging its former history as the segregated Lewis Mountain Negro Area. The campground was swarming with RVs flying Confederate flags when I hiked through. This flag would haunt the hikers all the way to Mount Katahdin, the trail's end point, in northern Maine. They would see it in every state, feeling the tendrils of hatred that rooted it to the land they walked upon.

During the early part of my through-hike, I arrive in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, one afternoon, a little later than I planned. I was one of many thirtysomethings who'd ended their relationships, quit their jobs, left their pets with best friends, and flown to Georgia. By this point, I'm 200 miles into my arduous, rain-soaked trek. Everything aches. The bluets and wildflowers have emerged, and I've taken a break in town to resupply, midway through my biggest challenge thus far, the Smokies.

It isn't until I'm about to leave town that I see it: blackface soap, a joke item that supposedly will turn a white person black if you can trick them into using it. I'm in a general store opposite the Nantahala Outdoor Center. The soap is in a discount bin next to the cash register. I'd popped in to buy chocolate milk and was instead reminded of a line from Claudia Rankine's book : "The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow."

There's a shuttle back to the trail at Newfound Gap leaving in 15 minutes. I fumble to take a photograph of the cartoon white woman on the packaging, standing in front of her bathroom sink. She can't believe it. How could this happen? Her face and hands are black. She scrubs to no avail.

I leave. Cars honk. I'm standing at an intersection and straining to return to the world. The shuttle arrives to take us from town to trailhead. The van leads us up, up into the mountains. It's a clear day. Hikers are laughing, rejuvenated. "Did you have fun in town?" a friend I met on the trail asks. "This visibility is unreal," says another, nose against the window. He thinks he has spotted a bear. The sun has lifted spirits. The van spills us out, but I can barely see a thing.

Two days later, a stream of texts hit my phone. Prince has died. I feel my vision blur, sit down on the first rock I see, and don't move for a while. The hikers who walk past ask if I'm hurt. "I'm sorry to tell you this," I'll hear myself say. "Prince just died." No one knows who I'm talking about. I will see variations of the same vacant expression for the rest of the day. "The Prince of Wales?" one hiker asks.

I'm losing light. I have to get to the next shelter. The afternoon has been a learning experience: the trail is no place to share black grief. Later, when Beyoncé releases Lemonade, an album that speaks powerfully to black women, I won't permit myself to hear it out here. I'm lonely enough as it is, without feeling additional isolation. I keep it from myself, and I follow the blazes north. I tell the trees the truth of it: some days I feel like breaking.

The National Park Service celebrated its centennial last year. In one brochure, a white man stands boldly, precariously, in Rocky Mountain National Park, gazing at a massive rock face. He wears a full pack. He is ready to tackle the impossible. The poster salutes "100 years of getting away from it all." The parenthetical is implied if not obvious: for some.

In a Backpacker interview from 2000, a black man named Robert Taylor was asked about the hardest things he faced during his through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. He'd recently completed both the AT and the Pacific Crest Trail. "My problems were mainly with people," he said. "In towns, people yelled racist threats at me in just about every state I went through. They'd say, 'We don't like you,' and 'You're a nigger.' Once when I stopped at a mail drop, the postmaster said, 'Boy, get out of here. We got no mail drop for you.' "

It will be several months before I realize that most AT hikers in 2016 are unaware of the clear division that exists between what hikers of color experience on the trail (generally positive) and in town (not so much). While fellow through-hikers and trail angels are some of the kindest and most generous people I'll ever encounter, many trail towns have no idea what to make of people who look like me. They say they don't see much of "my kind" around here and leave the rest hanging in the air.

The rule is you don't talk about politics on the trail. The truth is you can't talk about diversity in the outdoors without talking about politics, since politics is a big reason why the outdoors look the way they do. From the park system's inception, Jim Crow laws and Native American removal campaigns limited access to recreation by race. From the mountains to the beaches, outdoor leisure was often accompanied by the words whites only. The repercussions for disobedience were grave.

"For me, the fear is like a heartbeat, always present, while at the same time, intangible, elusive, and difficult to define," Evelyn C. White wrote in her 1999 essay " Black Women and the Wilderness." In it she explains why the thought of hiking in Oregon, which some writer friends invited her to do, fills her with dread. In wilderness, White does not see freedom but a portal to the past. It is a trigger. The history of suffering is too much for her to overcome. This fear has conjured a similar paralysis nationwide. It says to the minority: Be in this place and someone might seize the opportunity to end you. Nature itself is the least of White's concerns. Bear paws have harmed fewer black bodies in the wild than human hands. She does not wish to be the only one who looks like her in a place with history like this.

Perspective is everything.

There are 11 cats at Bob Peoples's Kincora Hiking Hostel in Hampton, Tennessee. When I ask Peoples how he keeps track of them, he responds, "They keep track of me." We talk about the places he's hiked and the people he's met. "Germans have the best hiking culture of any country," he says. "If there was a trail to hell, Germans would be on it." The chance of precipitation the next day is 100 percent. When it drizzles the rain plays me, producing different sounds as it strikes hat, jacket, and pack cover. Of the many reasons to pause while hiking, this remains my favorite. The smell and sound of the dampening forest is a sensory gift, a time for reflection.

The first bumper sticker I see in Hot Springs, North Carolina, says that April is Confederate History Month. A week later, I stay in a hostel near Roan Mountain, Tennessee, next to a house that's flying a Confederate flag. Hikers who've hitched into town tell me that the rides they got were all from drunk white men. Be careful, they warn.

I reconsider going into town at all. It's near freezing. Two days ago, I woke up on Roan Mountain itself in a field of frozen mayapples. Today I wear my Buff headband like a head scarf under my fleece hat. When I walk a third of a mile back to the trailhead alone the next morning, I look at the neighbor's flag and wonder if someone will assume I'm Muslim, whether I'm putting myself at risk. I lower the Buff to my neck and worry that I'm being paranoid. Six months later, the San Francisco Chronicle will report on a woman of color who was hiking in Fremont, California, while wearing a Buff like a bandana and returned to find her car's rear window smashed, along with a note. "Hijab wearing bitch," it said. "This is our nation now get the fuck out." She wasn't Muslim, but that's not the point. The point is the ease with which a person becomes a "them" in the woods.

Two weeks later, at Trail Days, there's a parade celebrating current and past hikers. A black man with the trail name Exterminator aims a water gun at a white crowd as he moves along. He shoots their white children. They laugh and shoot back with their own water guns. This goes on for 30 yards. I pause to corral my galloping anxiety. He is safe, I tell myself. This event is one of the few places in America where I don't fear for a black man with a toy gun in a public setting.

The Southern Poverty Law Center tracked more than 1,000 hate crimes and bias incidents that occurred in the month after the election. On November 16, 2016, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy posted information about racist trail graffiti on its Facebook page. It showed up along the trail corridor in Pennsylvania. The group was encouraging anyone who encountered "offensive graffiti or vandalism" to report it via e-mail.

Starting in 1936, amid the violence of Jim Crow, a publication known as the functioned as a guide for getting black motorists from point A to point B safely. It told you which gas stations would fill your tank, which restaurants would seat you, and where you could lay your head at night without fear. It remained in print for 30 years. As recently as 50 years ago, black families needed a guide just to travel through America unharmed.

There is nothing approximating a Green Book for minorities navigating the American wilderness. How could there be? You simply step outside and hope for the best. One of the first questions asked of many women who solo-hike the Appalachian Trail is whether they brought a gun. Some find it preposterous. But one hiker of color I spoke to insisted on carrying a machete, an unnecessarily heavy piece of gear. "You can never be too sure," he told me.

As a queer black woman, I'm among the last people anyone expects to see on a through-hike. But nature is a place I've always belonged. My home in South Florida spanned the swamp, the Keys, and the dredged land in between. My father and I explored them all, waving at everything from egrets to purple gallinules and paddling by the bowed roots of mangroves. This was before Burmese pythons overran the Everglades, when the rustling of leaves in the canopy above our canoe still veered mammalian.

Throughout my youth, my grandmother and I took walks in Miami, where I'd hear her say the words tuum nifas. It meant a delicious wind, a nourishing wind. These experiences shaped how I viewed movement throughout the natural world. How I view it still. The elements, I thought, could end my hunger.

Little has changed since. Now the rocks gnaw at my shins. I thud against the ground, my tongue coated in dirt. I pick myself back up and start again.

Every day I eat the mountains, and the mountains, they eat me. "Less to carry," I tell the others: this skin, America, the weight of that past self. My hiking partners are concerned and unconvinced. There is a weight to you still, they tell me. They are not wrong. My footing has been off for days. There were things I had braced for at the beginning of this journey that have finally started to undo me. We were all hurtling through the unfamiliar, aching, choppy, destroyed by weather, trying not to tear apart. But some of us were looking around as well. By the time I made it through Maryland, it was hard not to think of the Appalachian Trail as a 2,190-mile trek through Trump lawn signs. In July, I read the names of more black men killed by police: Philando Castile, Alton Sterling. Never did I imagine that the constant of the woods would be my friends urging, pleading, that I never return home.

That was then. Back home in Oakland, California, now, my knees hurt. I struggle with the stairs. I wonder if it's Lyme disease from an unseen tick bite. The weight I lost has come back. My arms, the blackest I ever saw them after weeks in the summer sun, have faded to their usual dark brown. The bruises on my collarbones from my pack straps are no more. My legs aren't oozing blood. My feet haven't throbbed in four months. I am once again soft and unblemished and pleading with my anxiety every day for a few hours of peace. My timing couldn't be worse. The news is relentless. Facts mean nothing. The truth is, I don't know how to move through the world these days. Everything feels like it needs saving. I can barely keep up.

Who is wilderness for? It depends on who you ask. In 2013, Trail Life USA, a faith-based organization, was established as a direct response to the Boy Scouts of America's decision to allow openly gay kids into their program. A statement by the group made the rules clear: Trail Life USA "will not admit youth who are open or avowed about their homosexuality, and it will not admit boys who are not 'biologically male' or boys who wish to dress and act like girls."

Roughly two years later, news outlets profiled the Radical Monarchs, a group for children of color between the ages of eight and twelve, intended as a Girl Scoutsfor social activists. Headlines like "Radical Brownies Are Yelling 'Black Lives Matter,' Not Hawking Girl Scout Cookies" highlighted what an intersectional approach to youth activism could look like. Organizations such as Trail Life USA and Radical Monarchs show opposite ends of the outdoor spectrum. For conservative Christian men, religion is used as a means of tying exclusionary practices to outdoor participation. For people of color, the wilderness is everywhere they look. They don't need mountains. Wilderness lives outside their front doors. Orienteering skills mean navigating white anxiety about them. They are belaying to effect change. And even then, their efforts might not be enough.

"People on the trail, overwhelmingly, are good people, but it isn't advertised for us," says Bryan Winckler, a black AT through-hiker who went by the trail name Boomer. "If you see a commercial for anything outdoor related, it's always a white person on it. I think if people saw someone who looked like them they would be interested. It's not advertised, so people think, That's not for me."

Brittany Leavitt, an Outdoor Afro trip leader based in Washington, D.C., echoed this sentiment. "You don't see it in the media," she told me recently. "You don't see it advertised when you go into outdoor stores. When I do a hike, I talk about what's historically in the area. Nature has always been part of black history."

She's right. Outdoor skills were a matter of survival for black people before they became a form of exclusion. Harriet Tubman is rarely celebrated as one of the most important outdoor figures in American history, despite traversing thousands of miles over the same mountains I walked this year.

"How can we make being in the outdoors a conduit for helping people realize, understand, and become comfortable with the space they occupy in the world?" says Krystal Williams, a black woman who through-hiked the AT in 2011. The change is happening slowly, in large part because of public figures bringing attention to the outdoors. Barack Obama designated more national monuments than any president before him. Oprah has called 2017 her year of adventure. "My favorite thing on earth is a tree," she told ranger Shelton Johnson, an advocate for diversity in the national parks, when she met him in Yosemite in 2010. A recent photo of Oprah at the Grand Canyon shows her carrying a full pack. "Hiking requires no particular skill, only two feet and a sturdy pair of shoes," she said. "You set the pace. You choose the trail. You lock into a certain rhythm with the road, and that rhythm becomes your clarion song."

Halfway through the descent into Daleville, Virginia, I found myself lying on the trail floor, wincing up at the canopy. I had taken a sudden tumble and was dazed. My right ankle ached badly, though my trekking poles had saved me from a truly nasty sprain. It was not a difficult stretch of trail-some packed dirt, a few small rocks, plenty of switchbacks. I felt betrayed and then ashamed. I could feel my confidence evaporating. If I couldn't walk a well-groomed trail, what in the world was I going to do with the boulder scrambles awaiting me in the north? Falls could be fatal. At worst this one was a slight embarrassment, but it marked the first time I needed to forgive myself for what I could not control.

Every inch of my being by that point had been shaped by an explicit choice. In pursuit of Katahdin-which I reached on October 1, after six months of hiking-I had wept and chopped off the long, natural hair, so politicized in America, that my grandmother had told me to always treasure. My afro was no more. I had left my skin to ash, my lips to crack. I wore my transmission-tower-print bandana like an electric prayer. The Appalachian Trail was the longest conversation I'd ever had with my body, both where I fit in it and where it fits in the world.

One of the popular Appalachian Trail books I read while preparing for my trek asked readers to make a short list of reasons why they wanted to do it. The author suggested we understand these reasons, down to our core, before embarking, coming up with something deeper than "I like nature." I took out this document often when things felt overwhelming on the AT, when the enormity of the pursuit threatened to swallow me whole. Looking back, the list is a series of unrealized hopes. One line reads: "I have always been the token in a group; I have never chosen how I want to lead." Another says: "It will be the first time I get to discover not whether I will succeed but who I am becoming." The last line is a declaration: "I want to be a role model to black women who are interested in the outdoors, including myself."

There were days when the only thing that kept me going was knowing that each step was one toward progress, a boot to the granite face of white supremacy. I belong here, I told the trail. It rewarded me in lasting ways. The weight I carried as a black woman paled in comparison with the joy I felt daily among my peers in that wilderness. They shaped my heart into what it will be for the rest of my life.

One of the most common sentiments one hears about the Appalachian Trail is how it restores a person's faith in humanity. It is no understatement to say that the friends I made, and the experiences I had with strangers who, at times, literally gave me the shirt off their back, saved my life. I owe a great debt to the through-hiking community that welcomed me with open arms, that showed me what I could be and helped me when I faltered. There is no impossible, they taught me: only good ideas of extraordinary magnitude.
Rahawa Haile (@rahawahaile) is an Eritrean American writer whose work has appeared in Pacific Standard, Brooklyn Magazine, and Buzzfeed. She lives in Oakland.
Lead Photo: Courtesy of Rahawa Haile

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Solo-Hiking the AT During a Summer of Political Chaos

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What happens when an African American woman decides to solo-hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine during a summer of bitter political upheaval? Everything you can imagine, from scary moments of racism to new friendships to soaring epiphanies about the timeless value of America's most storied trekking route.

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"When Money is the Bottom Line: The Inclusion Problem in the Outdoor Industry" by Brown Gal Trekker

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"When Money is the Bottom Line: The Inclusion Problem in the Outdoor Industry" by Brown Gal Trekker

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An inside look at how inclusion (or a lack thereof) manifests in the Outdoor Retailer trade show

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When Money is the Bottom Line: The Inclusion Problem in the Outdoor Industry - Brown Gal Trekker

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I never anticipated ever attending the Outdoor Retailer. And yet, before doing so, many issues surrounding the topic of inclusion have come to the surface after decades and decades of suppression of the voices that have been wanting to emerge as a force in the industry. Among such voices a

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"Untokening Mobility: Beyond Pavement, Paint and Place"

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"Untokening Mobility: Beyond Pavement, Paint and Place"

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Defines mobility justice and reveals how the design of urban spaces contributes to racial injustice.

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"Op-Ed: Outdoor Companies Drag Their Feet on Inclusion" by Teresa Baker and Glenn Nelson

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"Op-Ed: Outdoor Companies Drag Their Feet on Inclusion" by Teresa Baker and Glenn Nelson

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Describes the performative changes being made by Outdoor Retailer and outdoor businesses regarding inclusion.

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Congratulations, Outdoor Retailer. You've moved your biannual trade show from a state, Utah, whose leadership is openly hostile to the concept of inclusive public lands and pushed the Trump administration to shrink Bears Ears National Monument, which is so critical for its protection of Native lands that a coalition of tribes agreed to co-manage it. You moved to Colorado, a place progressive enough to legalize marijuana and have the inestimable Latino adventurer Luis Benitez in charge of its office of outdoor recreation industry.

Denver is a far more acceptable place to convene more than 1,100 outdoor and active-lifestyle brands, as the industry will do from January 25 to 28. But we haven't changed the stance we held when the show was held in Salt Lake City for the previous 20 years: We still ain't coming.

It may be a different venue, but it's the same old party. Like our president shuttling between the White House and Mar-a-Lago, the places change, but the faces-and results-remain the same. Outdoor Retailer remains a show of whiteness and power in their greatest form-a gathering to promote gear, products, companies, and commitment to the great outdoors that apparently does not include any people of color.

Oh, there will be a smattering of us in Denver, hoping to be noticed. And it will be hard not to notice when the few don't look like the many. We know the feeling well. We were just part of a panel, along with our friend Scott Briscoe of Patagonia and Expedition Denali, at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. We often were the only three nonwhites wherever we went in the small town of Nevada City, in one of the very whitest counties in California.

Even so, what followed us around in Nevada City were the winds of change. The festival has developed a statement of inclusion and encourages equitable work among filmmakers. It asked us to hold an honest discussion about race, and we did, in a room jammed with people on a sunny day with films showing all around us. People stopped us on the streets to ask for leads, names, and advice. The past few years, the festival roster has included films showcasing people of color.

This is a small organization in a small place making small changes, but as hotelier J. Willard Marriott once said, "It's the little things that make the big things possible." We see the bigger possibilities, unfulfilled, in the outdoor industry, which according to its own research contributes billions of dollars to the U.S. economy.

So many outdoor companies have talked to us about the importance of diversity and inclusion that we've lost count. We've always agreed wholeheartedly. While filmmakers might have an artist's sensibility about the value of inclusion, the outdoor industry's is a survival imperative. If your customer base is almost exclusively white and aging out, as is happening with the membership of environmental groups, then you need to ride the coattails of demographic change in this country. If you haven't courted people of color with urgency and sincerity by the time nonwhites are the majority in the United States,in 2044 or earlier, will you still be in business?

The outdoor industry has talked a good talk, but its actions have been barely a whisper. The racial makeup of management teams and boards of directors speak the real truth. Where are the decision-makers of color? Where are the faces of color among employees and in social media and other marketing materials? American history has us so accustomed to being excluded, all it might really take is just an invitation-to look, to buy, to build loyalty. But we're still waiting for that first company to publicly and overtly court us.

The lack of attention prompts us to gaze into a mirror and ask: Why has an entire industry looked past us without a second thought of inclusion? Why has an entire industry shown little to no interest in having us as the face of their products? Why has the outdoor media not placed us on their covers? Are we not enough?

Or maybe we're too much.

We noticed an event at this year's winter Outdoor Retailer show, " An Industry Reimagined." It made our hearts skip a beat, but in the end it was yet another slap in the face. A panel of four white executives discussing a new world is not much different than the sci-fi films from most of our lifetimes-neither much envisions people of color in the future. Three years ago, the so-called CEO Pledge touched off a movement for female leadership, and "progress" was made by hiring women executives who were white. The industry has become adept at playing this shell game of intersectionality-cloaking racial inequities with whitewashed choices based on gender, sexual identity, and physical disadvantage.

It's time to stop the dishonest narrative of nonwhites missing from the outdoors. We're there, just not the way the country's default culture likes to define it. Our absence, and the supposed need to get us outside, is a fable the outdoor industry likes to perpetuate to justify not showing us. As such, we find great hope from looking within, from entrepreneurs of color like Len Necefer of Natives Outdoors. If we can't be written into the script, we might as well flip it. If you can't join them, beat them. And in a few years maybe, while the show goes on in Denver, we'll be in a place like, say, Flint, Michigan, telling our own stories and celebrating our own successes.
Glenn Nelson founded TrailPosse.com to cover race and equity in the outdoors. Teresa Baker is the founder of African American Nature and Parks Experience.
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Lead Photo: Kristen Curette Hines/Stocksy

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Op-Ed: The Outdoor Industry Stinks at Inclusion

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Congratulations, Outdoor Retailer. You've moved your biannual trade show from a state, Utah, whose leadership is openly hostile to the concept of inclusive public lands and pushed the Trump administration to shrink Bears Ears National Monument, which is so critical for its protection of Native lands that a coalition of tribes agreed to co-manage it.

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Whose Story Counts? | Carolyn Finney TED talk

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Whose Story Counts? | Carolyn Finney TED talk

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Carolyn Finney, author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

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Whose Story Counts? | Carolyn Finney | TEDxMiddlebury

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Protecting Public Lands, Together: An Interview with Len Necefer of NativeOutdoors

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Protecting Public Lands, Together: An Interview with Len Necefer of NativeOutdoors

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Today is the day that the Trump administration is scheduled to announce their plan to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 1.1 million acres and slash Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in half. While this is worrisome for outdoor enthusiasts and conservationists, for Native Americans, this is a vicious attack on their home, history, and identity. I urge my fellow white members of the outdoor community to elevate and center native voices when we talk about land access issues. Public land is first and foremost an issue of racism, not recreation.

In this interview, I chat with Len Necefer, founder of NativeOutdoors, about the challenges he faces as a Native person in the outdoors, what the outdoor community can learn from Native Americans, how the outdoor industry and tribes need to become allies, and the importance of the Bears Ears Education Center. Len and I are on a grassroots team to build the Bears Ears Education Center, which you can learn more about here.
Len Necefer, Ph.D. is the founder of NativesOutdoors, a outdoor gear company that works with indigenous artists and athletes to create gear that supports outdoor recreation on tribal lands. He is a member of the Navajo Nation & holds a Doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Engineering and Public Policy. How did you get into outdoor recreation?
I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas for the first few years of my life. As one could imagine living in the Midwest the outdoors was fairly difficult to access. We had to drive pretty far to get to mediocre public lands. However, while my outdoors adventures in Kansas were limited, during the summer I got to fully be immersed in the outdoors. My grandparents still retained many parts of ranching & farming in the Chuska Mountains and in Red Valley, Arizona.

Getting them outside was a necessity in many instances - gathering herbs & plants, grazing the sheep, going to the well and getting water. It was during these outings of collecting plants and grazing we were told stories about the land and the history of the place we lived. I remember scrambling around volcanic rocks with my cousins during the summers in the Chuska mountains over 20 years ago. Little did we know that we were doing V2, V3 bouldering just to kill time. However I also remember discovering climbing by the anger of my relatives about the various white folks that would venture out and try climbing on Shiprock (a sacred volcanic outcropping). In the early 70's a man died climbing Shiprock which lead to the ban of all rock climbing, not only here, but all over the Navajo Nation.

Given that backdrop of climbing on the Navajo Nation I wanted to discover it for myself. In grad school about 4 years ago I got a membership at a small climbing gym in Pittsburgh - it wasn't anything special but it definitely stoked my interest. Then when I moved out to Colorado I took it upon myself to learn how to do get better & eventually go outside. I've been fully climbing for little less than a year. I hope to one day figure out a way to roll back the complete ban of climbing on the Navajo Nation and allow for it to happen in designated areas.

Specifically to Bears Ears: When I moved to the reservation when I was a teenager my mom and stepdad made it a point to get out and explore the Navajo Nation and surrounding areas. Cedar Mesa, Dark Canyon Wilderness, Comb Ridge, Valley of the Gods were places that we would often visit as they were less than 3 hours away from Tsaile. These are where I had some of my first serious outdoor experiences. These places are where I encountered the thousands of years of history that I come from. This is the place where I first felt proud about being Navajo.
Tell us a little about how you relate to the land, and how that relationship may differ from a non-native person.
My relationship to the land is my identity, it is what I live to protect, and by doing so it one thing I can ensure that future generations can enjoy the places we call come. These values are informed by a number of rites of passages and traditions that connect us to the land from an early age as Navajos.

One of the first rites of passage as a Navajo is that our parents bury our umbilical cord in a place that has spiritual significance to our family. Our umbilical cords enable us to grow and live in utero and giving the cord back to the earth allows one to acknowledge and recognize the role that the earth serves for us after we are born. The place where my umbilical cord is buried is where I return to during challenging times and it is a place where I return to reflect as I grow older. This tradition is a gift because it provides me with roots and a deep understanding of our connection to the earth from an early age. I find that many, not all, non-native people don't have this direct connection to place.

As we grow older we participate in medicinal and healing ceremonies that directly come from the landforms and mountains that we call home. These ceremonies often directly call out the four sacred mountains and acknowledge their power and purpose in Navajo worldview. The ethic of reciprocal relationships with these landforms is one of the main tenants of these practices. For the healing, mental clarity, and other benefits that these places provide through these ceremonies we must always return the favor by giving offering, actively protecting these places, and making strident efforts to ensure that they are preserved for the future.

The benefits derived through the ceremonies is something that all folks can relate to and aren't that different for why folks like to get outside. Like many people, I get outdoors for my own mental and physical wellbeing, that feeling of mental clarity and feeling physically good after a long day of climbing or skiing is exactly what our ceremonies provide for people. That feeling, the mental clarity is exactly the power of these natural spaces. We as Navajo people have simply institutionalized and developed these into healing practices.

One area where I see there being some need for development of the outdoor community is in acknowledging and giving back for these experiences. I see the status quo being an extractive relationship with the land specifically taking experiences without giving back. Going out and recreating in the mountains or desert without giving something back isn't sustainable. I'm not a perfect example of what this should look like but I try to acknowledge my impact. Volunteering is a good idea, giving money to organizations that maintain these areas is a good step too. Simply what I ask is what are the things we each are capable of doing to ensure that these places we care about are maintained for future generations?
What are some of the biggest challenges you face as a native person in the outdoor community?
Resources & Connections

I do not come from a community with many financial resources or connections. Even less so specifically in the outdoor industry. I have started NativesOutdoors by taking on debt with few connections to folks and resources that could help me take this to the next level. I'm breaking down these barriers so that other folks, with less privilege than myself, can have the same opportunity that I have now to create this business. Every day I wonder how much longer I can continue this work without further investment. I worry that this NativesOutdoors idea will die on the vine and that the status-quo will remain - underrepresentation of communities of color in the outdoor industry.

Legitimacy & Relevance

I believe the largest reason why I have been taken seriously in the outdoor community is because of how articulate I am and the flashy education credentials that I have. The fact that I am a native person who is passionate about the outdoors seems to be secondary. I think there is a tentative acceptance that I am capable but I have yet to see the opportunities appear (at least until I was asked to be a part of the Bears Ears Education Center fundraising).

Other issues

Tribes have been working on protecting Bears Ears for decades and much of the heavy lifting has been done by them. Not to downplay the outdoor community but their contributions, while vitally important, are relatively new and far less substantial in comparison. One concern that many Native folks have about efforts to protect Bears Ears is that the outdoor community will attempt to claim all the hard work and then have a sense of entitlement to the area. Tribes already have enough challenges protecting sacred sites, the thought of dealing with folks that feel entitled to accessing an area is a bit nauseating. However I think that public education and hard work by athletes, influencers, and brands can set important precedents in preventing this.
What do you want the outdoor community to know about native land?
Many folks are aware that native people were forcibly and brutally displaced from their homelands however the extent and timeframe which this occurred is not well understood by the outdoor community. Each tribe is unique and the dispossession of their land has its own story.

The process of Indian removal on a systemic scale extended all the way into the 1970's (some would argue that the Dakota Access Pipeline was a continuation of this policy). When forced removal fell out of vogue, assimilationist policies, which accompanied forced removal policies, continued until the 1960's. These included the Dawes Act & Indian Termination which aimed to dismantle tribal governments and tribal lands by forcing native people to adopt lifestyles that were not their own - namely being forced into cash economies, private land ownership (that led to forced removal by banks), and the dissolution of tribal lands and governments.

So why is this relevant to the outdoor community? Many of the lands that now encompass private and public land belonged to native people as late as the 1960's. The wounds of these removals and policies are quite fresh and in all instances out of the control of the native people that lived there. Now the outdoor community is creating and solidifying identities and relationships with lands that native people today do not have the opportunity to. One can image how frustrating that is for the native folks seeing this happen when just a couple generations ago this connection was strong. Now non-native folks can fairly effortlessly enjoy themselves in these places because of these policies.

This is the context and it's not a comfortable place to be.

However, from my experiences with the outdoor community folks tend to want to do the right thing to try and rectify this history, yet many folks don't know where to start or are afraid to do anything. However, folks need to carry the weight to make these things happen and it's going to take a lot of work. Donating to this cause is one way to correct this history. The next is education your fellow recreationists about this area and how to respect it.
What values or attitudes do native people hold that you believe the outdoor community should adopt?
Relationship of reciprocity with the land, not just for oneself but for folks that are coming behind them.

Learn about the history and people that consider the place where they recreate home. Understand that forced removal and assimilation policies enable recreation in places that are considered scared.
Why do you support the Bears Ears Education Center?
One thing I've been pushing in the outdoor industry is that a coalition between tribes' political and legal power with the outdoor industry's financial and social influence can be an unstoppable force in protecting public lands. I support the Bears Ears Education Center because it's the outdoor community stepping up to the plate and leveraging their financial resources and social media presence to educate the broader public about this culturally and ecologically sensitive area. Public education is going to be key to protecting this place as our current administration seems hell bent on defunding and under resourcing the agencies that would otherwise protect Bears Ears. If privatization is what they are shooting for, I'd say let's get there before the extractive industries do.

My opinion & support on this topic are my own and as no group of people are monolithic and it is important that I acknowledge thar there are native people who do not agree on supporting this education center. The reasons for opposition may not be readily apparent however I agree with the premise of the opposition - namely why aren't we as Native people telling our own story about this instead of a group of folks from the outdoor industry telling it for us? Another concern is that if this place is ultimately protected and the legal fight is won - who's going to claim the credit for the work done? Many, including myself, fear that native people will again be erased from the picture yet again. I asked questions of the organizers to this effect and I was satisfied with the responses to support the effort. I trust the intentions of the organizers and participants to do the right thing.

Yes, we as Native people deserve to tell our own story and I see this effort to build the education center as the steps toward making this happen. Time is of the essence in this situation and it's a lot easier for the outdoor industry to garner financial resources to make these things happen. Secondly, if we are not at the table, we are on the menu. I created NativesOutdoors as a company in the outdoor industry specifically so we could have a seat at the table in these efforts. I'm going to do the right thing by Native people.
Why is it important for the outdoor community to support, respect, and learn about the tribes?
The outdoor community benefits from historical policies that have removed indigenous people from the land. While this history cannot be undone, supporting, respecting, and learning about the tribes of the places we recreate is one way we can bring things closer to a place of healing. Native people aren't gone and are the strongest allies and advocates for protecting and ensuring access to the places we care about. Together we can protect the places we deeply love and care for.
To support and learn more about our efforts towards building the Bears Ears Education Center, check out the Kickstarter

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Protecting Public Lands, Together: An Interview with Len Necefer of NativeOutdoors

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Today is the day that the Trump administration is scheduled to announce their plan to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 1.1 million acres and slash Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in half. While this is worrisome for outdoor enthusiasts and conservationists, for Native Americans, this is a vicious attack on their home, history, and identity.